The belfry of "Santa Maria del Fiore" is one of the most brilliant artistic works and symbol of the city of Florence, a genius and really grandiose idea of Giotto, created more as a decorative monument rather than as a functional one.

In 1334 after Christ, after a slow down in the works of the new Cathedral that lasted more than thirty years, Giotto becomes the responsible of the works and decides to project again an original belfry. In order to achieve this new element decorating the square, the maestro works from 1334 after Christ to 1337 after Christ, year of his death, seeing realised only the first zone, where the cuspidal entrance opens itself. His painting experience leads him to decide upon an external decorative coating that proceeds in parallel with the structural building, everything obviously at the cost of the realisation speed. White marbles of Carrara, red of Siena and green of Prato freshen the forms, and subdivide them with a classical severity, while on all the sides appear the painting cycles through a succession of little octagonal forms with relief painted by Andrea Pisano on designs which were in part the work of the hand of the same Giotto.
Andrea Pisano himself substitutes Giotto the year when he dies and at his time, he is substituted, in 1348 after Christ, by Francesco Talenti who, with some modifications on the original project, concludes the works in '59.
The architecture of the belfry, slight and refined (84,70 metres for 14,45), has a square map and is supported at the corners by buttresses with the form of pillars that reaches the top.
Both series of little forms with low relief of the first piano (representing the allegories of the work, the symbolic figures of the celestas bodies, of the Virtues, of the liberal arts and of the Sacraments), and the sixteen statues of the second piano have been substituted by copes. The original works are actually preserved in the "Museo dell'Opera del Duomo" (Museum of the Work of the Cathedral); among these statues we find the magnificent ones of Nanni di Bartolo and Donatello such as the famous Abacuc.
The last three foregrounds of the Belfry of Giotto are the fruit of the genius of Francesco Talenti. In these plans we find large vertical windows with double "bifora" in the third and fourth plan and of only one "trifora" in the fifth, which gives a certain refine sensation, without any sense of heaviness, typical of the gothic. This is also due to the happy intuition of Talenti: a terrace with large dimensions appreciably projected towards the outside, in alternative to the normal cusp of the gothic belfries. A design preserved in Siena, well illustrated as the final part of the monument should have been, certainly less innovative and original, without the intervention of Talenti.